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‘Has anyone seen wee man Dom? He has been out kayaking and I haven’t heard from him – am starting to worry…’

This was the Facebook post that began my nightmare.

My brother Dom Jackson was an experienced and fit outdoor adventurer who loved the wilds of Scotland – and he was now reported missing in freezing conditions after setting out for a short kayaking trip.

As with many accidents it was a series of events which led to his tragic death.

A friend who changed plans at the last minute left Dom deciding to head out alone.

A poor choice to protect his phone by storing it in a difficult to access rear hatch.

And then rapidly changing weather conditions that caught him unawares.

When the worst happened and Dom found himself in trouble he didn’t stand a chance of gaining access to his phone.

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Freezing cold and alone, being pushed further out to sea, Dom’s final actions would have been resourceful to the end and he would have done everything he could to resist the inevitable.

Hope is what carried my family through the five days of searching with the RNLI, police and HM coastguard along treacherous cliffs and impossible coastline.

We joked that he would be a turtle ambassador, travelling the world and sharing the book with schools and children.

Hope is what kept me going while coordinating a massive Facebook and media campaign from Australia, where I was living at the time, helping to organise hundreds of volunteers and relaying Dom’s story to millions of people around the country.

Hope, which gave way to a mixture of sheer relief and utter desolation when finally they found him and we could bring him home.

Dom’s one wish in life was to be part of something big and it has been bittersweet for me to help him to achieve this dream through his tragic death.

Just two weeks before he died, Dom edited a children’s book I had written called Duffy’s Lucky Escape. As keen nature lovers with backgrounds in environmental science, my true story about a turtle eating too much plastic and being rescued, rehabilitated and released was always going to have Dom as its number one fan.

We joked that he would be a turtle ambassador, travelling the world and sharing the book with schools and children.

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Amazingly, Dom left me some money in his will and I am now achieving our dream as the book has reached over 250,000 children worldwide and is translated into over 15 languages.

Duffy’s Lucky Escape and Marli’s Tangled Tale tackle the problem of ocean plastic and balloon releases in a gentle and inspiring way to motivate children, their families, schools and wider business communities to make the changes our environment so desperately needs.

I am working with many environmental groups around the UK to help raise awareness and support their campaigns.

In just over a year since those terrible few days, my young family and I moved back to the UK after living in Australia for nine years.

Our children have started new schools, two books have been published with a third on the way and we have also started a charity to raise awareness of safety planning in adventure sports, called Plan B.

Plan B was set up after Dom’s death to try to ensure that this tragedy doesn’t happen to any other family.

In particular we are raising awareness of Personal Locator Beacons (PLBs) which, in an emergency, use satellites to pinpoint your location to within metres and then send this information directly to the emergency services.

Had Dom carried a PLB the outcome of his trip could have been very different and it may have saved his life – something we have to live with every day.

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To find out more about the work Plan B does and to support us please visit planbcharity.org.